For the first time in about three years, I’ve had two weeks off work. I’ve spent a lot of time just relaxing and taking a break from things, but I’ve also been able to get back to doing some graphics work. Ever since Vivendi bought Activision, the project that I was leading has been “put on hold”, so I’ve been back on the game team. It’s not as fun for me, that’s for sure, but luckily, I have my code at home to play with, so all is not lost!…
Minor Update to MockItNow
This is just a quick note to say that I’ve updated MockItNow on Google Code to allow you to define storage types on a per-class basis using the DECLARE_STORAGE_TYPE macro. I did this so that the Mocker can deal with abstract class parameters. Please note that the macro must be declared at global scope because it uses partial template specialization. I updated the download, and the source. You can see the new test at the end of the file here, and the only other affected file is Storage.h. Thanks to Lance for…
Lighting: The Rendering Equation
Back in 2002, I started my first job in the games industry at Climax Studios in England. I have to admit, I didn’t know very much about game development at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’d been writing little 2D games, and messing around with rubbish particle systems at home, but it was nothing like what I was about to get involved with. Despite my inexperience, somehow I did enough to pass the interview, and I was offered a job as a junior programmer. As seemed to be typical…
Catmull-Clark Subdivision: The Basics
For a little under a year now, I’ve been using Modo to learn how to create 3D models. I’m doing this partly for fun, and partly to help me think about game engine features from the perspective of an artist. Along with the traditional poly-modeling tools, Modo (like many other 3D tools) also has support for subdivision surfaces. A subdivision surface basically allows you to create a low-poly control mesh for your model, and to add detail, you let the application divide each face in your mesh according to a…
Counting Objects In A List in C# 3.5
While I was reading through some C# 2.0 code that a friend of mine wrote, I noticed that he was finding some objects in a List using a foreach loop. As soon as I saw that, I thought to myself that I would probably have done that using FindAll with an anonymous delegate. That got me thinking about all the different ways you can find things in a List in C#. I’ve recently upgraded to using Visual Studio 2008, so with the advent of C# 3.5 there are even more…
Nothing To Report
Well, there’s not much to report really. I’ve been spreading myself very thin recently, investigating a few different things, so I thought might be nice to post a status update. Variance Shadow Maps Yes, I’m jumping on the variance shadow maps boat. They look nice, they’re easy to implement, and have relatively small overhead over traditional shadow maps. I read the article in GPU Gems 3, which is also available here, and it was pretty easy to implement from there. It probably took me about 2 hours to go from…
Materials
A while back, I wanted to improve the material system I was using in my engine at home, since at the time, I had just just one fixed material type. I had to specify three textures for each object I wanted to render: Diffuse, Specular and Normal. If I didn’t want specular, I had to use a black specular texture. This was barely OK for very simple things, but soon I wanted more… I’m not really going to mention anything about the lighting in this article, since that’s still a…
MockItNow: Sample Code Added
I’ve just uploaded a sample project for MockItNow to Google Code. Get it here. This file includes the Examples project, the latest version of MockItNow, and UnitTest++. The projects are provided in Visual Studio 2005 format, and should compile out of the box. Please note that this is a slightly modified version of UnitTest++, since the current release doesn’t catch std::exception in all cases. I’m going to work with Charles at some point to integrate these changes back into the main branch of UnitTest++. I’ve provided three configurations for the…
MockItNow: Redirecting Function Calls in C++
This is the first in a short series of articles I’m going to write about the way MockItNow works. I’m going to start off with something pretty meaty: How does MockItNow intercept the function calls and redirect them? I tried a few ways of intercepting function calls and recording their parameters, and maybe one day I’ll explain ways not to do it, but for now, read on if you’re interested in how it works at the moment.
Welcome!
I finally took the plunge to set up my own website! I’ve been wanting to do this for a while to be able to share some of the things that have interested me as I spend my spare time writing a small game engine. I hope that someone somewhere finds these things interesting! One other reason that I set up the site is to have central place to store information about a couple of small pieces of software I wrote: DoItNow and MockItNow. DoItNow is a little addin for Visual…